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The Catalogue of Radial Velocity Standard Stars for Gaia I. Pre-Launch

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The Catalogue of Radial Velocity Standard Stars for Gaia I. Pre-Launch Astronomy & Astrophysics manuscript no. RV˙final c ESO 2018 March 19, 2018 The catalogue of radial velocity standard stars for Gaia ⋆ ⋆⋆ I. Pre-launch release C. Soubiran1, G. Jasniewicz2, L. Chemin1, F. Crifo3, S. Udry4, D. Hestroffer5, and D. Katz3 1 LAB UMR 5804, Univ. Bordeaux - CNRS, F-33270, Floirac, France e-mail: [email protected] 2 LUPM UMR 5299 CNRS/UM2, Universit´eMontpellier II, CC 72, 34095 Montpellier Cedex 05, France 3 GEPI, Observatoire de Paris, CNRS, Universit´eParis Diderot, 5 place Jules Janssen, 92190 Meudon, France 4 Observatoire de Gen`eve, Universit´ede Gen`eve, 51 Ch. des Maillettes, 1290 Sauverny, Switzerland 5 IMCCE, Observatoire de Paris, UPMC, CNRS UMR8028, 77 Av. Denfert-Rochereau, 75014 Paris, France Received March 19, 2018; accepted XX ABSTRACT The Radial Velocity Spectrograph (RVS) on board of Gaia needs to be calibrated using stable reference stars known in advance. The catalogue presented here was built for that purpose. It includes 1420 radial velocity standard star candidates selected on strict criteria to fulfil the Gaia-RVS requirements. A large programme of ground-based observations has been underway since 2006 to monitor these 1 stars and verify their stability, which has to be better than 300 m s− over several years. The observations were done on the echelle spectrographs ELODIE and SOPHIE on the 1.93-m telescope at Observatoire de Haute-Provence (OHP), NARVAL on the T´elescope Bernard Lyot at Observatoire du Pic du Midi and CORALIE on the Euler-Swiss Telescope at La Silla. Data from the OHP and Geneva Observatory archives have also been retrieved as have HARPS spectra from the ESO archive. We provide a mean radial velocity in the SOPHIE scale for each star, derived from the combination of velocities measured with those instruments, after having carefully estimated their differences in zero points. In total, 10214 radial velocity measurements have been obtained for the 1420 stars. With 1 a mean time baseline of 6.35 years, 92.9% of the candidates fulfil a target stability criterion of 300 m s− . Three hundred forty-three 1 stars are found to be constant at the level of 100 m s− over 10 years. Comparisons with earlier catalogues show excellent agreement 1 1 for FGK stars, with zero-point differences lower than 100 m s− and a remarkably low RMS scatter of 33 m s− in one case, suggesting that the precision of the catalogue presented here is better than this value. This catalogue will likely be useful for other large-scale spectroscopic surveys, such as APOGEE, Gaia-ESO, HERMES, and LAMOST. Key words. Catalogs – Radial Velocities – Stars: kinematics and dynamics 1. Introduction about five million stars down to V 13 and iron and α-elements abundances for about two million≃ stars down to V 12. Such Gaia, the next astrophysical mission of the European Space ≃ 1 a large spectroscopic survey will have a tremendous impact on Agency (ESA), will be launched in 2013 . It will survey the many science cases, such as the chemistry and dynamics of the entire sky during five years, and measure the positions, proper 9 Milky Way, the detection and characterization of multiple sys- motions and parallaxes of some 10 stars down to a visual mag- tems, and variable stars. More details of the expected science nitude of 20, with an expected parallax accuracy of 10 to 25 µas yield from the RVS are described in Wilkinson et al. (2005). at 15th magnitude (de Bruijne, 2012). Stars classified as single will have their effective temperature, surface gravity, and metal- licity estimated, as well as interstellar extinction. The RVS has a resolving power of 11500 and covers the The Radial Velocity Spectrometer (RVS) on board Gaia will spectral range 847 874 nm, which includes the near-infrared provide radial velocities (RV) of about 150 million stars down Caii triplet, many lines− of iron and α elements, and Paschen arXiv:1302.1905v2 [astro-ph.SR] 2 Apr 2013 th 1 to 17 magnitude with precisions ranging from 15 km s− at the lines in hot stars. This spectral range− has already proven to 1 faint end to 1 km s− or better for G and K stars at magnitudes be very well suited to RV analysis with the RAVE survey brighter than V 13.5 (Katz et al., 2004; Katz, 2009). The RV, ≃ (Steinmetz et al., 2006). The RVS is an integral field spectro- combined with astrometry, will give access to the six dimensions graph with no entrance slit and no on-board wavelength calibra- of the phase space useful for kinematical studies. The RVS will tion source. As a consequence, the RVS wavelength dispersion also provide rotational velocities and atmospheric parameters for law will be derived from the RVS observations. The instrument will be self calibrated. As explained in Jasniewicz et al. (2011), ⋆ Based on data obtained within the Gaia DPAC (Data Processing and Analysis Consortium) and coordinated by the GBOG (Ground-Based ground-based radial velocity standards are mandatory for cal- Observations for Gaia) working group, at various telescopes; see ab- ibrating the wavelength zero point, which otherwise would be stract mathematically degenerated with the radial velocity scale (i.e. ⋆⋆ Tables are only available in electronic form at the CDS via anony- a shift in the wavelength scale can be compensated for by a mous ftp to cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsarc.u- shift in the RV scale). The Gaia Data Processing and Analysis strasbg.fr/viz-bin/qcat?J/A+A/552/A64 Consortium (DPAC), and more specifically its Development 1 http://www.rssd.esa.int/index.php?project=GAIA&page=index Unit ’Spectrocopic Processing’ (Katz et al., 2011), is responsi- 1 C. Soubiran et al.: The catalogue of radial velocity standard stars for Gaia ble for establishing the requirements for this external calibration amplitude in our sample has been reduced because of all these and for the acquisition of the necessary auxiliary data selection criteria and a careful analysis of the RV measurements In principle asteroids are excellent sources for calibrating available for them so far. The HR diagram of the 1420 candi- the zero point because their radial velocity can be derived dates is shown in Fig. 1, as originally published in Crifo et al. 1 from celestial mechanics with uncertainties lower than 1 m s− . (2010). However, they cannot be the main reference sources for Gaia because they are not numerous enough in the appropriate mag- nitude range and their sky distribution is limited to the Ecliptic Plane. When we started to search for suitable RV standard stars six years ago, there was no existing dataset fulfilling the Gaia RVS requirementsin terms of sky coverage,magnitude range, number of targets, and stability. The only official list of standard stars was the one compiled by the IAU Commission 30, which did not turn out to be suitable for our purpose.We thus built a stellar grid consisting of 1420 FGKM stars in the magnitude range 6 < V < 11, with a homogeneous distribution on the sky. The selection process of that sample is fully explained in Crifo et al. (2010). We briefly summarize it in Section 2. The RVS calibration requires standard stars with much bet- 1 ter RV stability than the 1 km s− accuracy expected from their future measurements with RVS, with no drift until the end of the 1 mission (2018). The value of 300 m s− is adopted as the stabil- ity level to be checked.To qualify as a referencestar, each candi- date has to be observed at least twice before launch and another time during the mission to verify its long-term stability. The RV Fig. 1. HR diagram of the 1420 selected stars, with a colour code measurements available to date are described in Section 3, and corresponding to their origin. their combination into a homogeneous scale in Section 4. We compare this new catalogue to other studies in Section 5. The stablest stars are presented in Sect. 6 as are considerations about variable stars. Future work is described in Sect. 7. 3. Radial velocity measurements 2. Radial velocity standard-star candidates The RV standards to be used for the RVS calibrations should not 1 The selection of stars suitable for building the reference grid exhibit variations larger than 300 m s− during the five years of for RVS has been carefully considered and several criteria de- the Gaia observations, between 2013 and 2018. Since the stan- fined (Crifo et al., 2010). The list of candidates was established dards need to be known beforelaunch, we extrapolatedthis crite- from three catalogues: “Radial velocities of 889 late-type stars” rion to the current period in order to perform a pre-qualification (Nideveret al., 2002), “Radial velocities for 6691 K and M of the candidates according to their stability during the time giants” (Famaey et al., 2005), and “The Geneva-Copenhagen span of our ground-based observations, between 1995 and 2012. Survey of Solar neighbourhood” (Nordstr¨om et al., 2004), com- Considering that the candidates already have a good observa- plemented with IAU standards (Udry et al., 1999). We selected tional history, our strategy of pre-qualifying them is (i) to obtain the stars having the best observational history in terms of con- at least two new measurements per star before the Gaia launch, sistency of radial velocity measurements over several years. In separated by more than one year, and (ii) to verify that the vari- 1 that way we could focus on stars more likely to be stable over ation in these new measurements does not exceed 300 m s− .
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